Students at a US university have launched a competition which aims to test the limits with which so-called keystroke biometrics can identify users through their typing patterns.

The Pace University students says the competition will address the situation where a user has enrolled a normally-typed sample during a testing phase, but then their typing behavior is seriously handicapped due to injury or distraction.

“Is it possible to identify a one-handed typing sample? Should the user be re-enrolled while typing with only one hand?”, asks the organizing committee.

Offering a fingergprint scanner as a prize, the organisers suggest using Python starter code as a good place to building a model. Entrants should aim to beat a benchmark score and then provide a short description of the methodology used.

Participants can make up to one submission per day. The leaderboard will be calculated on 50% of the data until the last day of the competition to avoid overfitting.

Results of the competition will be submitted as an invited paper to the 8th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics to be held in Phuket, Thailand on 20-22 May, 2015.